Victorian Double Sided Palette-Worked Hair Mourning Necklace

Now all but forgotten, the art of wearing mourning jewelry was once a common practice for hundreds of years. Popular in the time before photography, mourning jewelry was created to serve as a keepsake to remember a lost loved one.  Gaining in popularity during the Civil War, hair work was an affordable and common at-home drawing room past time, much like knitting. Patterns and templates were widely available in newspapers, fashion magazines and periodicals. Many young women earned a living making hair jewelry at home. For those less skilled or crafty, hair jewelry also could be purchased through catalogs or from jewelry stores. All one had to do was decide which piece they would like to have created and then send off a lock of hair to have it transformed into the piece of their dreams.  Traditionally, there were two different types of hair work techniques: table-worked hair and palette-worked hair.  Table-worked hair involved the use of a small, flat braiding table (a top hat or bandbo